Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to James · About this commentary
Where Do Wars Come From?
James 4:1-3
1 Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don’t they come from your pleasures that war in your members? · WEB
The letter traces congregational conflict to wanting, and then says the wanting itself was never brought to God.
Verse 1 asks the question and answers it in the same breath. The fights do not come from doctrine, from outsiders, or from circumstance. They come from pleasures at war in your members — the battle inside is prior to the battle between.
Verse 2 is the letter's most compressed sentence and its punctuation is disputed in every version. The sequence is clear enough: you desire and do not have; you kill and covet and cannot obtain; you fight and wage war.
The word kill is startling in a letter to congregations, and it does not have to be softened for the argument to work. The letter has already said that hatred and speech belong to the same family as violence James 3:9, and it will shortly accuse the rich of condemning and murdering the righteous James 5:6. What the sequence describes is desire escalating through whatever means are available.
Then the diagnosis, and it is anticlimactic on purpose: you do not have because you do not ask. After the wars and the killing, the fault named is a failure to make a request.
Verse 3 closes the remaining exit. Some do ask and receive nothing, and the reason is the motive — asking wrongly, to spend it on their pleasures. The same word for pleasures as in verse 1, so the circle closes: the asking had been recruited by the very thing it should have addressed. Prayer offered to fund an appetite is the appetite, praying.
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